Abstract
This portfolio constitutes the culmination of the Practitioner Doctorate course in Psychotherapeutic and Counselling Psychology at the University of Surrey and consists of three dossiers containing a selection of work carried out as part of this training. The dossiers pertain to academic, therapeutic practice and research engagement respectively and aim to reflect the interests informing this engagement and the resulting accomplishments and the particular skills and competencies gained as well as give a sense of the professional and personal development overall. The academic dossier contains three essays. The first essay explores the Oedipus complex as developed by Freud through using an example from the life of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The second essay examines how mindfulness can be conceptually integrated into cognitive therapy and how this can be applied to working with distressing psychosis. The third essay explores how a humanistic stance can inform therapeutic practice with clients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder within current clinical contexts. The therapeutic practice dossier aims to give an impression of my development as a practitioner and contains a description of the clinical placements undertaken and provides an account of my journey towards becoming a counselling psychologist. The research dossier consists of three pieces of research, namely a literature review and two empirical studies and contains copies of published journal articles and conference papers. The focus of the research has been on ‘sense-of-presence’ experiences and meaning-making in bereavement. The literature review explores whether such experiences can be conceptualised as spiritual phenomena. The first empirical study is a qualitative investigation of perceivers’ experiences and meaning-making processes with regard to this phenomenon, employing a form of thematic analysis. The second empirical study is a case study, using interviews and participant observation, which examines family meaning-making in connection with sense-of-presence phenomena from an interpretative pluralist perspective.